In the process of developing a car today, first pieces produced are assembled into prototype vehicles which can then be used for consumer evaluations, engineering tests and safety, emissions, fuel economy tests with the government. The sooner such prototypes are ready, the shorter the process becomes.
After the prototypes, the first run of pilot vehicles are built, next, it is then imperative to get the first vehicles of an approved project to the showroom. The question then is how to produce these vehicles in the shortest possible time frame realizing however, that they have to be dimensionally correct--often times to a few thousandths of an inch (0.1 mm), in many of the critical sealing or chassis dimensions.
In bygone days when dimensions were not so critical, tooling jigs could be hastily slapped together to support the various pieces of the car such that the vehicles could be produced. Slowly as the production evolved, one could adjust the jigs to make the body better to a degree. Today however, it is impossible to sell a car that has poor body dimensional fits. Furthermore the consumer magazines and opinion leaders test these early vehicles and form judgments that may linger for the vehicle lifetime.
Today, there are at least two different sages of potential tooling production; one for the initial prototypes; e.g. 200-300 units, and, production tooling used to produce however many cars will sell. In this latter regard it is noted that while many cars have been built with tools that could produce 200,000 vehicles a year, the actual market has not been so kind and the cost of such tooling become an enormous burden if sales are only 15,000 for example per year.
It not generally known in the art how to produce dimensionally accurate bodies without resulting to expensive fixed hard tools of the high production kind, at least if "world class" in dimensional precision is needed. (0.1 millimeter precision for the location of the various mating surfaces and hole to hole locations are critical to the function of the body and its chassis components.)
Another problem with present production results if one does build such dimensionally accurate "production hardened" tools, one is often precluded from changing to other bodies rapidly if the intended one does not sell. Although certain attempts have been made with interchangeable tool plates such as the Comau "Robogate" or the Renault systems; these solutions are "brute force", and in any case are still practically limited to a relatively small number of different bodies e.g. 4. And too, in the case of the conventional tooling for example a body is often thought to be different even though it might be the same car but in a sedan or coupe version, or a different name plate, with slight differences in the basic platform.
While at least one attempt worldwide has been made to provide completely programmable body tools (the Volkswagen "Geobox"), this is very expensive and in any case poses the question of exactly where in location the programmable details are, i.e. a control problem.
Few similar attempts have been made to flexibly produce the smaller subassemblies, such as doors, underbodies, side flames, etc., which often form a critical bottleneck,
This invention seeks to solve all of the above problems and particularly forms an economic and unitary flexible production system for all bodies from the earliest prototypes all the way through to production of at least 5,000 units. The system further is expandable into low cost rapidly changeable tooling which can produce 200,000/yr.
In addition the system invention described has several additional features simply not obtainable in today's conventional body-building technology:
Finally the optical sensor adaptive control system described is usuable for both totally programmable robotic part positioning as well as for positioning conventional tooling such as NC blocks and locators used in high volume assembly. Of importance is that variations of each, incorporating some fixed rapidly repositionable details, and some programmably repositionable details are possible with the invention.
Other features for both total programmable flexible automation and reconfigurable hard tools will become apparent from consideration of the embodiments.